Gwyneth Lewis was Wales’s National Poet from 2005 to 2006, the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. Her first six books of poetry in Welsh and English were followed by Chaotic Angels (2005) from Bloodaxe, which brings together the poems from her English collections, Parables & Faxes, Zero Gravity and Keeping Mum, and by A Hospital Odyssey (2010), and Sparrow Tree (2011), winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2012. Her other books include Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression (Flamingo, 2002) and Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (Fourth Estate, 2005) and The Meat Tree: new stories from the Mabinogion (Seren, 2010). Her Welsh collection, Y Llofrudd Iaith (Barddas, 2000), won the Welsh Arts Council Book of the Year Prize, and her last English collection, Keeping Mum was shortlisted for the same prize. Both Zero Gravity and Keeping Mum were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Gwyneth Lewis composed the words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff, opened in 2004. She lives in Cardiff.

Chaim Lewis was a writer, poet and a teacher. He was born in Soho in 1910, the child of Russian immigrant parents. In 1935 he married Ada Malka Ferber, daughter of Zvi Hirsch Ferber, the rabbi of Dean Street shul, Soho’s most famous synagogue.

From Soho to Jerusalem is a poetry collection published in 2000.

Philip Levine was born in 1928 in Detroit, where he studied at Wayne University. After working as a labourer, he settled in Fresno, California, and also lived in other countries for some time, including Spain. He taught at Fresno until his retirement, and now divides his time between Fresno and Brooklyn, New York. Levine has received many awards for his poetry, including the National Book Award (1980 & 1991), and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth. He has published 17 collections of poems and two books of essays, and was appointed US Poet Laureate in 2011 at the age of 83.

Stranger to Nothing: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2006) covers his American collections from On the Edge (1963) to Breath (2004). It is his first UK publication since Secker published an earlier Selected Poems in 1984. He has since published a later collection, News of the World (Knopf, 2009).

Denise Levertov (1923-97) was born in Essex, and educated at home by her father, a Russian Jewish immigrant, who became an Anglican priest, and by her Welsh mother. She sent her poems as a child to T S Eliot, who admired and encouraged her. In 1948, she emigrated to America, where she was acclaimed by Kenneth Rexroth in The New York Times as 'the most subtly skilful poet of her generation, the most profound, the most modest, the most moving,' and during the following decades she became 'a poet who may just be the finest writing in English today' (Kirkus Reviews). Throughout her life, she worked also as a political activist, campaigning tirelessly for civil rights and environmental causes, and against the Vietnam War, the Bomb and US-backed regimes in Latin America.